Hollywood targets Wua.la, closes down largest user group

Netzwelt.de is reporting that Warner Bros is keeping a close eye on the social file sharing and storage network Wua.la. The movie studio recently contacted Wua.la after it discovered that dozens of its titles were traded through a private group on the Wua.la network.

The Gulli Usergroup had more than 3000 members, according to Netzwelt. One of those members was apparently working for Warner, and he spotted around 80 titles of the studio in the group. Warner demanded the take-down of the titles, and Wua.la responded by getting in touch with the group admin, threatening to close it down if the trading of the movies was to continue. The admin in turn closed down his group by himself.

Wua.la is an interesting file sharing network because it combines persistent storage with social elements, and it aims to be something like a secure storage solution for users of Facebook and similar networks. Wua.la does offer is users to trade files publicly or in private groups, and some of these user-generated groups seem to target warez and movie file swappers.

However, sharing lots of large files with Wua.la is somewhat cumbersome. Users only get one Gigabyte of storage when they sign up. They can earn additional Gigabytes through sharing parts of their hard drive for Wua.la's decentralized storage system, but most users will probably not meet the requirements to do so.